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The Single Most Frustrating Thing About My Life In Prague

I'm at the end of my rope with the way I can't speak Czech.

Yesterday, I went out shopping for nabytek (furniture) with my friend Leona, and she refused to do any of the talking in shops or restaurants, so I had to order for us, ask the ladies at the hoisery store to get me my size, etc. Leona was my first Czech teacher, and is a good friend, so if I sound retarded in front of her, I don't mind much, and I felt happy, because I successfully communicated my needs to people in Czech several times over the course of the day. It's a good feeling to speak sentences usefully in what I can only describe as a uniquely impenetrable and mystifying foreign language. I'm great!

Then, last night, I went out with this man I teach English to. It was a lovely, cool, windy, Autumn evening. We climbed up to the top of Petrin Hill, to the sweet little Eiffel Tower of Prague. The trees were rustling in the wind, leaves and acorns were falling, and the view over the darkening city was beautiful and romantic (I feel I can safely say that, because it was my friend who came up with that analysis of the situation, not me). I like him a lot, so it was an unmitigated pleasure to see him outside of the conference room in which we usually meet for our lesson. Again: great! I was delighted!

Then, there's the part -- inevitable! -- when he says, "So, what can you say in Czech," and the answer, just as inevitably, despite my fairly extensive Czech vocabulary, ability to count to 300, and total mastery of the language needed to read menus, is a whole load of stupid, useless things like: "I like hairy legs," or "where is the toilet?" In other words, I can say NOTHING. Not great! I suck!

In fairness, I am capable of dozens of sentences that begin with "it is..." and end with an adjective. Likewise, if the sentence begins with "I like...", "I want...", "I need..." or "I have..." and ends with a noun, or even an adjective/noun combo, I can accomplish it with reasonable accuracy. I can even accomplish those feats when the subject of the sentence is the familiar or formal "you"! I can conjugate the verb "to be," and I know personal and possessive pronouns! Still, if someone says "the moon is shining in the sky" to me, I am stumped after the word "moon", which I do know. Again: not so great.

And, JESUS, people, THE PRESSURE! On the one hand, trying to learn Czech is an invaluable experience for me as an English teacher, because it makes me respect my students enormously for their very impressive ability to communicate so clearly in languages other than their own. It also gives me a more immediate sense of what they're up against. However, I am beginning to think that every one of them is WAY cleverer than I am, because every time a Czech sentence has to come out of my mouth, even if I totally know what I want to say, and how to say it; even if have rehearsed it in my mind a hundred times before I come out with it; I still feel like a TOTAL IDIOT when I do say it.

There is nothing that has the power to make you feel like a bigger tool than not knowing how to say something extremely simple in a foreign language, especially when you really, really want to, and when, after someone says it to you, you realize that you DID know it, but you could not dredge up that information from the thick sludge of your sluggish, stupid brain. I absolutely despair of myself in those moments, and sometimes I think I'm about as likely to ever learn Czech as I am to become a billionnaire, or grow to be 6 feet tall and have the body of a swimsuit model.

To make matters worse, Czech people are lovely! Many of them speak good English, and are very proud of it, so if they see that you speak English, they are all too happy to switch. Now, I can often understand what people are saying if I'm not all tensed-up about it, and am given the leisure to listen to several sentences, letting context and expression reveal the meanings of words I don't know. What happens though, is that people say one sentence to you, and then look at you expectantly. If you ask them to repeat it, even if you ask in Czech, they translate. That's very nice of them, but I need them to keep speaking to me in Czech.

Sometimes, too, they try to teach you the words they are speaking -- also, completely lovely of them -- but Czech words are so incredibly foreign to my mind that remembering them, with all their little diacritical marks and unpronounceable combinations of consonants, is really impossible without, at the very least, seeing them written. At best, I also need something memorable to tie them to; some situation, need, or desire that will make them stay in my sieve-like brain. The situation in which you've just totally failed to understand something very simple, something you might have understood with more context, or a slower, more clearly enunciated repetition, is often one that makes you feel like a jackass to whom a deep and intractible insufficency has been revealed, and after which one desires nothing so much as forgetfulness.

As I mentioned previously, I went out with this man I teach English to last night. He's an intelligent person who has definite thoughts and strong opinions about many, many topics that are of great interest to me. Everytime I talk to him, I enjoy it more than I did the last time, and it would be my dearest wish to be able to understand more than what I can't help feeling is the bare sense and shape of his thoughts. So much of what we communicate is conveyed by subtleties of word choice and nuances of language, and the result of my inability to field Czech is that my student/friend remains a complete mystery to me, despite the literal HOURS I have spent talking to him. Frustrating!

On top of that, there's something very uncomfortable, for me, about the balance of power of a situation in which someone, most particularly a man that I genuinely like, has to speak to me all the time in MY language, instead of ever being able to tell me his thoughts in his own. I don't like it, and at that point, I JUST WANT TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK CZECH. I swear, if I thought I could have Czech installed into my brain like they installed Kung Fu in Keanu Reeves's brain in The Matrix, I would fully have myself fitted with a goddamned jack in my goddamned head.

I have a lot of lovely friends here, and even more people I would really like to know better than I do. So many of my students are such interesting people. I want to understand them with the fullness that can only be achieved when listening to them in their mother tongue. I want to be able to hear the subtlties of what they are saying, and not just the broad strokes. Because of that, learning Czech is at the top of my list of priorities, but sometimes I'm afraid that I NEVER WILL, because I am clearly mentally deficient.

In conclusion, ARGH!!!

Of course, the second most frustrating thing is my absolute inability to speak Man-Language. Seriously, gentlemen, what are you all about? What does it all mean?! If only my interlocutors would see fit to TRANSLATE THAT.

Comments

If they are good in English ASK then how to say things in Czech.

I constantly ask my students what the words I hear in Spanish mean.

This is how I came to understand the major words for ass: tracero(behind), nalgas(butt cheeks) and nachas (ass). Each has it's own usefulness. And while culo may mean ass in Italian it means the specific ass-hole in Spanish.

I am still confused by culero and punllado but I have puto, cabron and bendejo down.

Well, yes, of course, Tosho. I always ask about words which seem, somehow, to be especially significant to me. How do you think I learned to say "I like hairy legs?" It's easy to remember things like that! For instance, the word for "moustache" is "knírek". No problem!

The problem is, in Czech, there are seven cases, which change according to what place a word occupies in a sentence. Nouns (even proper nouns and NAMES), adjectives, and prepositions all change form for each of them, in bewildering fashion. Additionally, there are masculine animate and inanimate, feminine, and neuter nouns, all of which present themselves differently, and also affect the forms of every word surrounding them. In fact, there is a different verb form, even, for if a woman is speaking, rather than a man.

So, in Czech, you can know all the words for ass you want, but actually USING them in a sentence to converse with a Czech person about whom you are maybe feeling a little nervous, and who is looking at you expectantly, having just delivered himself of a sentence in which you know maybe two or three words, but aren't totally sure about the preposition, and are wracking your poor, stupid brains for the main point of it all? That's still absolutely impossible without having memorized a huge amount of variable grammar, no matter how many words you ask for.

Ah, foreign languages! Among my very favorite subjects to study, but I too run into the inability to speak in more than the most rudimentary of sentences with very simple and seemingly random vocabulary, and I often waste precious time trying to construct a thought from English in a very literal manner instead of just learning the proper idiom in that language. If prepositions or articles stymie me, I typically try to mumble my way through it, hoping my listener won't notice.

The most important thing when learning a foreign language, however, is to just *let go*. I always think of what my favorite German professor once said to us, "Es gibt immer Fehler," meaning, "There are always mistakes." What he was trying to say at the time was that we were all going to make those stupid little grammatical/vocabulary errors, so no one should stress out about it because no one was expecting perfection from us.

So I think you should have your student teach you Czech...kind of the way that my best German buddy out here teaches me German. We sit in a cafe and try to talk to each other, and I'm constantly asking her, "How do you say....?" "How do you say...?" And she'll gently correct me in a way that doesn't make me feel like an idiot, and sometimes I'll have to help her think of words in German. Most of the time, we speak in some weird Gerglish hybrid, but we understand each other, and that's all that matters!

As for Man-Language...beats me, sister. I've never been particularly fluent, and my personal translator has gone completely haywire.

What I would really like is for my student to just speak Czech to me, and not worry too much about whether or not I understand -- just let me listen and ask for words I need to know. I mean, people speak Czech to me on a daily basis, and I gather what they mean, despite not knowing some words, from gesture, expression and context. I think he is uniquely postioned to help me enormously with my Czech, because of how I really want to understand him. But, we shall see if he is willing to do it. He's busy, and all that.

Meanwhile, I read a whole page of a Czech fairy tale this morning, about a rooster and hen searching for nuts in a foresty park. They went out, and the rooster said "whatever we find, we'll share by halves," and the chicken agreed, so off they went. The chicken raked and rummaged for nuts, and the rooster found nuts, too, but he was stingy, and wanted all the fresh nuts to himself. He swallowed them up so that the chicken didn't know, and filled his throat with them until he was choking. "hurry up, chicken," he said, "bring water or I will die!" So he said, rolling around on the ground, with his feet in the air. The chicken went to the fountain for water.

it's a quite long fairy tale, Jaime, and a lot of thinks happens. But be sure the story always aims to good.
Not easy to learn Czech, I can imagine, and must split a secret with you that Czech children learn Czech for nine years to know! So, believe me, you still have time enough even you don't like it.
Just an example of this cruel language for you foreigners:-) :
Slepička kohoutka zachrání. Kohoutek se zastydí, že nebyl spravedlivý, a že chtěl slepičku podvést. Uvědomí si, jak moc pro něj slepička znamená a má ji rád až do smrti.
This educative fairy tale is also meant as a translator of men thinking.
See you.

Hm... The Hen rescued the rooster. Rooster was ashamed of himslef, as if he wasn't upright, and wanted to decieve the hen. He realized that she was the best hen when he called to her when he was dying? Am I close, Pavel?

I finished the fairy tale. My favorite part is when the hen asks the meadow for some grass for the cow, and the meadow says she will give the hen grass if she begs for dew from heaven. Then the hen says:

"Nebe, nebíčku, dej louce rosičky..."

Which, for all the rest of you, means "heaven, sweet heaven, give some sweet dew to the meadow..." The very best thing about Czech is the incredibly sweet diminuitve forms of everything. So lovely.

Pavel, I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to seeing you soon!

Close, right! Only the part about death is slightly different. It's the very common ending of most of Czech fairy tales ... and they loved each other until their end.
It's nice for you, that you have understood the sense :-)

It's only because I have a dictionary that I have understood it! It's only kind of nice. On the bright side, I had three hours of Czech lessons today. Come hell or high water, I will learn this language!!!

Sadly, this ending doesn't cast much recognizable light on the mystifying behavior of men. Of course I don't include you in this assessment, though, Pavel.

"Nebe, nebíčku, dej louce rosičky..." ... it sounds like Shakespeare in English. I think, no dictionary could help without feeling for the language that you must already have. So according my estimation not nine, but four - five years would be enough.

You don't understand the fairy tale? Kohoutek je frajer & cheater, but slepicka loves him irrespective of it. What men would want more?

Oh, I understand it. The rooster is dishonest and cheats her, but she goes to the end of the earth, and finally begs for dew from heaven to save him, even though he is so bad. In the end, he sees that he was wrong, and they live happily together after that.

I also heard that another version of the story exists in which the hen brings back the water in her little beak (do zobačku!) only to find that he is already dead... and why? Because he was so stingy! So sad!

All I can add to this, is that one can only go to the ends of the earth if one actually has a rooster that calls on one for help, and therein lies my personal tragic tale.

I hope you're right about my Czech. I am really so frustrated at how I absolutely cannot speak any useful sentences. But, I have to admit, I think I am making some small progress lately...